Recover deleted /etc/passwd File In RHEL

So far we have talked a lot about Linux guys but there is a topic which we haven’t touched much in our discussion and that’s Linux Troubleshooting. So what if we discuss it right now. Not a bad idea guys so let’s get prepared to get your hands dirty in troubleshooting your machine. Today we ‘ll see what to do if your /etc/passwd file is deleted.

For this tutorial I deliberately deleted my /etc/passwd file. Now it’s your time to do so and don’t worry as we’ll recover it quite easily.Once you have deleted this file, you can’t login to any user account on your machine and you will get the following message.

Aila problem! But stay cool and restart your machine and boot into single user mode .If you don’t know how to boot into single user mode then you can get help from reading the initial steps of my previous article on hacking root password of Linux. Once you are there all you need to do is running following command- cp /etc/passwd- /etc/passwd and your problem is solved./etc/passwd- is simply the backup of /etc/passwd and you can use it in case the original file is gone. So it’s done guys BINGOOOO!